ANZ bans iPad use for board members

Lawyers for
Australia and New Zealand Banking Group
have refused to allow its board members to use Apple’s iPad to manage their papers because of concerns about the retention of data.

More organisations are providing board members with tablet computers to make the mountain of papers they must plough through more manageable. But ANZ’s chief information officer, Anne Weatherston, said the devices were not yet able to securely retain sufficient information should papers be required for court cases.

“Under Australian law, the annotation is a problem," Ms Weatherston said. “While we can secure the board paper, any annotations you make sit outside of the network and we cannot capture them or store them as a corporate-owned document."

She said lawyers had warned her that annotations of board papers constituted a legal document and it was up to Apple or application developers to work around the problem if it proved of great concern to others.

“Apple will probably eventually have an app that wraps it all up together . . . I think other banks have just gone ahead and done it, but our lawyers are a little bit more concerned," Ms Weatherston said.

BDO technology risk and security partner Stephen Coates said there was growing demand from board members to use tablet computers to help manage their workload, which IT departments often resisted due to security concerns.

He said: “Plenty of board members are across a number of different boards and they get a lot of papers that they have to lug home and review before lugging them all back to meetings, so it is a lot easier if they can have them all on one device that they are already using to do other aspects of their work."